Distracted, springtime remainders

by Maud |March 23rd, 2005

At the dentist (yes, again) yesterday, I picked up the latest issue of New York magazine and was delighted to find Keith Gessen’s excellent and highly critical review of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Saturday, which I’m currently reading.

The New York Suninterviews new Paris Review editor and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, who says, “I’m not planning to make it a journalism magazine.” According to the Sun, Gourevitch “plans to create poetry portfolios, meaning more poems for each poet, but fewer poets for each issue. Sometimes trying to get a sense of a poet from a single poem is ‘a little bit like a bonbon,’ he explained.”

Anne Rice’s son gets a glowing Stephen King blurb, prompting Rebecca Caldwell to wonder in The Globe & Mail whether the debut book from King’s son will feature a blurb from Anne Rice. “The publishing world is seemingly witnessing a boom in the population of writers whose parents made their living in literature,” Caldwell says.

Denis Johnson’s trilogy of plays, including Son of a Whore, is being staged most recently in Seattle. Last I heard, the Jesus’ Son author was at work on a novel called Tree of Smoke. (First link via Bookslut; more about the plays available here and here.)

X-Files star Gillian Anderson will play Martha Gellhorn in a film about the journalist and author (and one of the first female war correspondents) that will concentrate mostly on — you guessed it — “the acrimonious marriage between Gellhorn and Hemingway.”

A 900-page, previously unknown (in contemporary times) novel by Alexandre Dumas has been discovered in the French National Library.